In poultry hatchery management, it may be desirable to separate birds based upon various characteristics, such as gender, diseases, genetic traits, etc. For example, it may be desirable to inoculate male birds with a particular vaccine and inoculate female birds with a different vaccine. Sex separation of birds at hatch may be important for other reasons as well. For example, turkeys are conventionally segregated by sex because of the difference in growth rate and nutritional requirements of male and female turkeys. In the layer or table egg industry, it is desirable to keep only females. In the broiler industry, it is desirable to segregate birds based on sex to gain feed efficiencies, improve processing uniformity, and reduce production costs.
In some instances, such determination of the desired characteristic may be carried out prior to hatch by means (e.g., bioassay process) in which the results of the characteristic are delayed or otherwise not immediately known. That is, the testing method to identify the desired characteristic may require some minimal amount of time for the analysis to be completed. For example, bioassays may require several minutes to hours after sampling each egg until assay results are available. During the interval, sampled eggs contained in egg flats must be stored and later assay results must be associated to the respective egg flat that was sampled. Traditional tracking means such as bar codes, paint, marks on eggs, and radio-frequency (RFID) may present their own problems, wherein bar codes may peel off, paint or markings may be removed by egg flat washing, and RFID tags may be cost prohibitive due to the substantial quantity of egg flats circulating among a hatchery and its farms.
Accordingly, it would be desirable to provide a system capable of identifying an egg flat among a collection of egg flats so that information determined about the eggs may be accurately associated with the egg flat downstream in the overall process. Furthermore, it would be desirable to provide an associated method to identify an egg flat among a collection of egg flats.